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Authority
Authority originally referred to creative resolution, and those who had resolve and creativity in solving were seen as authorities or authority figures—they had auctoritas. The PIE root *aug-—meaning "to increase"—is the root of ‘authority’ as well as of ‘author’ for indeed no author is without authority (the question is how authoratative he is). The intelligence of those who are irresolute is many branched c. 5th Century BC. Authority "is the moral power of command, supported (when need be) by physical coercion, which the State exercises over its members. We shall consider here the nature, sources, limits, divisions, origin, and the true and false theories of authority. Authority is as great a necessity to mankind as sobriety, and as natural. By "natural" here is meant, not what accrues to man without any effort of his own (teeth, for example), but what man must secure, even with an effort, because without it he cannot well be man. It is natural to man to live in civil society; and where there is civil society, there must be authority. Anarchy is the disruption of society. Speaking generally, we may say no man loves isolation, solitude, loneliness, the life of a hermit; on the other hand, while many dislike the authority under which they live, no man wishes for anarchy. What malcontents aim at is a change of government, to get authority into their own hands and govern those who now govern them. Even the professed anarchist regards anarchy as a temporary expedient, a preparation for his own advent to power. Authority, then, in the abstract, every man loves and cherishes; and rightly so, for it is his nature to live in society, and society is kept together by authority. The model of hermits was St. Simeon Stylites, so called from his living on the top of a style, or pillar. That was his special vocation; he was no ordinary man. But the political philosopher considers man as man ordinarily and normally is. Two things would strike a stranger from Mars looking down upon this planet: how men on earth love herding together, and how they love moving about. Ordinary man can no more afford to be solitary than he can afford to be stationary, though Simeon Stylites was both. Solitary confinement is the severest of punishments, next to death. It is hard to say whether the solitude or the confinement, proves the more irksome. This simple point, that man cannot live alone, must be insisted upon, for all errors in the theory of authority are rooted in the assumption that man's living in society, and thereby coming to be governed by social authority, is something purely optional and conventional, a fashion which man could very well discard if he would, as he might discard the wearing of green clothes." New Advent 2019 Most simply, authoritarianism then means a way of following authority. Authority is besieged. The false Idea that "all Authority is false Authority" is rampant. You assume this because even prior to this, Authority is assumed to always commit a mega-fallacy in forcing its own mind to crush fallacies in itself and others. But torturing your mind this way is “destroying the village in order to save it”. Authority (auctoritas) does exist as legitimate, or it could not be “false” and objected to. Saying that it is always a fallacy because it commits fallacies all the time puts one in the position of pseudo-authority, which of course is always arguing and running after fallacies in one’s opponents, but never removing the beam from its own eye. Which in this case, means dethroning a false, but clear, authority in favor of a false and unclear one. Such is the modern world in toto, and this is basically all that is taught in Demostate-sanctioned Universites today. Hence, Logic is denied, and even Grammar changes its terms deceitfully, while Rhetoric becomes a mask for power. The mega-fallacy greases all the following ones. To get a feel for how this plays out concretely in absurd irony, read a history of the 1905 Russian Revolution, or the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin: the revolutionaries were constantly having to resort to ad hoc committees with total power, and to somehow salvage their new authority, despite the fact that the basis of their revolt was rejection of all authority. Rhizomata Society; Politics; Liberalism; Conservatism; Leftism; Hierarchy